Deployment on Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based container application platform that you can use to build, containerize, and deploy your applications so that they are highly available and scalable. You can also use the Open Liberty Operator to simplify deploying and managing your applications in the cloud.
After you develop and containerize your applications, your containers need to communicate with other containers that are running databases, security systems, or other microservices. Containers also need to scale as services are needed. Red Hat OpenShift provides features that automate and manage containers to meet the needs of developers and operations teams.
Running applications on Red Hat OpenShift
One of the benefits of running your applications on Red Hat OpenShift is that you can deploy them to a cloud-hosted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution, or to your current on-premises structure. You can use the Red Hat OpenShift CLI to develop your applications. Then, containerize applications in Open Liberty containers and deploy them to an Red Hat OpenShift cluster.
For a step-by-step tutorial on deploying microservices to Red Hat OpenShift, see the Deploying microservices to Red Hat OpenShift guide. To learn more about how your applications on Open Liberty can be used with the different Red Hat OpenShift deployment options, see the Red Hat OpenShift documentation.
Open Liberty Operator
Operators are extensions to Kubernetes that are customized to automate tasks beyond the initial automation that Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift provide. The Open Liberty Operator has a capability level of five, which means that it has the highest level of enterprise capabilities, including auto-scaling, service binding, and Red Hat OpenShift certificate management integration.
With the Open Liberty Operator, you can make applications highly available by configuring horizontal auto-scaling, which creates or deletes application instances based on resource availability and consumption. The Operator also helps manage application deployments. For example, after you upload a new container tag for a new version of an application, update the applicationImage field in the Operator deployment file with the new container tag. Then, the Operator updates the application on a rolling basis.
This Operator also offers other production-grade capabilities, including simple configuration of persistent or advanced storage and the ability to delegate single sign-on (SSO) to external providers.
You can install the Open Liberty Operator for use on Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift. For more information, see to the Open Liberty Operator installation documentation.
